Monthly Archive: December 2012

This week, I’ve acquired a new (to me, but also new in box, though not newest model) laptop. I got a great deal on it, thanks to a friend’s wife’s company liquidating some assets. It is a pretty spiffy system, all on its own: Late 2011 MacBook Pro, 2.4G Core i5, 4G of RAM, 500GB hard drive.

But then, being a geek, I got curious. And ともだち (tomodachi, the system in question) is getting a couple of upgrades.

First up, a new hard drive. I’ve opted for the Seagate Momentus XT. It’s a 2.5″ 750GB drive with a 32GB SSD cache. It is, by all reports, quite zippy. It is also $121.54, at the time of this writing.

I also thought that I might upgrade my RAM from 4G to 8G or so, and went to crucial to check things out. Turns out, I can upgrade from 4GB to 16GB for $77.99.

Now, I’m a reasonably old-school computer user, though I know many of you are much older hands. I never worked with punch cards. While I had used other computers before, the first one I really started making my own was a 386DX/33 that I got as a high school graduation gift. My benchmark pricing memory was being shocked when hard drives hit a dollar a megabyte. (That’s megabyte, kids, not gigabyte.)

And now, I find that I can get a kickass little laptop for less than a thousand dollars (with an admitted lucky break). It’s mostly the upgrades that I’m able to get for less than $200 that are really making me feel like I’m living in the future. I’ve recently renounced the statement, “I love living in the future,” but moments like these that kind of make me want to re-adopt it.

Amazon’s Gold Box Deal of the Day is a Scotch Thermal Laminator. I’ve had this laminator for a couple of years, and it works fantastically, especially for the deal price ($16.99). It will even handle 5 mil pouches, though you have to make sure you have it on the high setting for that. If you need a hot laminator, I highly recommend you pick this one up today.

I’ve been posting on Facebook about how I feel the urge to build things with my hands, but am stymied by the lack of actual artistic ability (and the fact that the really big LEGO sets cost more than a car payment). Brett suggested a trip to IKEA, somewhat as a joke. But my brain quickly tripped through the problems with that: Money and Space, neither of which I have. Which means that, if there were a smaller, cheaper version of IKEA…

IKEA dollhouses. Everything IKEA, in miniature, and everything is flatpack and whatnot, the way IKEA really is. Complete with miniature allen wrenches.

SOMEONE GET ME THE KING OF SWEDEN ON THE PHONE NOW!